The 2013 Beryl Bainbridge Poetry Competition

I still haven't managed to sleep right through the night without waking up at least once before dawn, and my tactic of running through the alphabet with place-names or such like has been replaced by listening to the radio through ear-pieces on my mobile phone.

Last night, an unpleasant dream involving anxiety about future work woke me up, and I plugged in the radio and bored myself back to sleep with the help of BBC Radio 4.

The trouble is that at some time in the middle of the night, Radio 4 turns into The World Service which - although a boon to captives tied to a radiator in a foreign land who are given a small transistor for good behaviour - does get a bit real at times, and I was re-awoken by a child soldier describing how he was forced to kill a fellow villager with a machete in front of his entire family. I can sleep through most things, but not these things.

So I yanked the earphones out and turned off the radio. Then - for some reason - I started to compose a poem using some disparate words which happened to pop into my restless head, and what I came up with is written below. This is as far as I got before laughing myself back to sleep, quietly chuckling away in the darkness, trying not to wake up H.I. next door. I often wake her up with snoring or loud farts, apparently. Ours is a compact but adorable city apartment, as I believe I have already said.

Ok, I know it is nowhere near up to the standard of Pam Ayres, but I think it has a certain merit. It being Sunday, when all the blog-poets have offered their wares to the world on Saturday night as the rest of us are trying to sleep, I am hoping that someone will take up the baton and complete it for me. I know it needs a bit of polishing before adding to, so don't worry about offending me with some heavy alterations and strike-throughs - I'm not precious. All the entries will be published, and the prize will go to the worst.


Beryl Bainbridge went to Cambridge
to visit some kith and kin.
But when she arrived, they were not there,
the fuckers were simply not in.

"Fucking Roger and fucking Iris!"
Beryl started to shout,
"If I ever see those fuckers again, 
I'm giving those fuckers a clout!"

"I even brought them a fucking cake!"
she bellowed out there on the street,
"It took me fucking ages to make!
It was good enough to eat!"